I am thrilled to be here tonight with all of you, and with our inductees, their families and friends.

Sigma Tau Delta holds a very special place for its significance and for our long history with it. GVSU has added around 400 inductees in a period of over 25 years. As a university built around the tenants of liberal education, recognizing students who distinguish themselves by their “sincerity, their love of truth, and their design of better futures” is a critical part of our mission.

In 1927, mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead argued that a University is imaginative or it is nothing – at least nothing useful. A university which fails to tickle our imaginations, create excitement about possibilities, and stretch our conception of what is possible has no reason for existence.

I know that we often debate the value of education and the value of liberal education. I would like to propose that language, the arts, the humanities are much more relevant and much more critical to education today than they ever been.

We are living in a time where the challenges we are facing have been created with our current social and technological systems. They cannot be solved from the same paradigms, the same framework that has created them.

We live in a world where we value and promote innovation. But the concept of innovation has been commoditized to designate the use of existing technologies, support existing structures, and magnify existing advantages.

This is a very reductive view of innovation. A much broader definition of innovation and much more transformational is one that is not bound by existing forces and limitations but one that is willing to question them and to imagine realities beyond them.

Humanities and the arts are freeing of the imagination. They train students’ mind to question everything and not take anything for granted. They cultivate our empathy and sensitivity to others’ suffering and create strong incentives to address them.

We live in a world where we value critical thinking. We train our students to be discerning, detached and critical so that they can penetrate the inner workings of our current systems and natural phenomena.  What we also need is hopeful imaginative thinking. Thinking that is not bound by the laws and constraints of existing systems but that dreams new emergent worlds. This is what the arts and humanities provide.

I do not see the two types of thinking as contradictory. I do believe that having one without the other makes for a truncated education and makes for an impoverished future.

I want to congratulate my colleagues and the University for recognizing this and congratulate all past and current inductees for having acquired this imaginative irreverent thinking – one that does not get intimidated by the strong forces for current reality, one that is hopeful and empowering. One that believes that education is nothing if it does not allow us to excitedly imagine new worlds, if it does not allow us to let new realities emerge in our imaginations and then participate in bringing them into existence.